A Battle of the Centers
by Iridescent Snowflake
Summary: Fun. Hope. Dreams. Wonder. How do you express your center through a one-of-a-kind sculpture?
1. A Friendly Competition?

"...And remember, your sculpture should be an exact reflection of your center," reminded Tooth. "The duration of this sculpting competition is five hours."

"Five hours?!" Bunny goggled at Tooth, who raised an eyebrow at him. "Crikey mate, are you expecting us to gather supplies and tools, hammer, chisel and chip away at a solid block in _five hours?_"

Jack snorted when he saw the look on Bunnymund's face. Huge eyes with white all the way around his spring green irises, scrunched up eyebrows and a gaping mouth with rabbit teeth poking out of them. Quite a sight.

"That's supposed to be part of the challenge! What, you can't work fast enough? And here I thought you said I can 'never keep up anyway'" said Jack with air quotes and smirk he knew would irritate Bunny. Turning to Tooth, he said: "5 hours are more than enough. For me, that is."

The Pooka's eyes narrowed.

"What happened to competitive side, Bunny?" boomed North. Bunny shot back: "Well, you've got it easy. You have a huge honking army of furry giants at your command!" He gestured to the yetis behind the red and black-coated figure.

"Well, you can always summon sentinel eggs," suggested North.

"That would be a great suggestion mate," said Bunnymund while rolling his eyes, "if they had arms."

Jack pictured the massive eggs hammering away at a block of stone with their feet and ending smashing the sculpture by accident. He snorted again.

"Lucky for me my helpers aren't as clumsy as yours." Baby Tooth fluttered over to Jack, seating herself on his pure white hair, her feathers ruffling excitedly. To everyone's surprise, a very reluctant brown fur-covered yeti by the name of Phil clomped over to Jack's side. North gaped at him disbelievingly. How on earth did Jack manage to get Phil on his side, no one will ever know. Jack gestured to his head and Phil dramatically with both hands. "This," he proclaimed, "is exactly what an invincible team looks like!" Baby Tooth squeaked cheerfully while Phil gave a half-hearted grunt. Jack twirled his staff in one hand as if he was the head of a marching band.

"GUYS!" yelled Tooth. All heads in the main room of North's workshop turned around. Sandy, who was floating in mid-air, was so startled by the sudden outburst that he nearly crash landed on the red carpeted floor.

Tooth's slender green and blue feather-covered arms were folded, a stern look on her face. "You guys didn't read the rules and regulations at all, did you?"

All four male Guardians glanced at each other wincing. Nobody had time for that… did they?

"I knew it," Tooth sighed. In a clear voice, she announced: "Rule number 31: Helpers are strictly not allowed in the competition."

"WHAT?!" yelped both Jack and North simultaneously. Bunnymund snickered. "Looks like we're even now."

Tooth shook her head. "You guys have to learn to be more independent. Like Sandy here!" Sandy created a top hat with his dreamsand and tipped it, bowing low.

Phil looked relieved. He turned to join his fellow yetis in the sidelines despite Jack protesting, "Hey Phil! Don't leave me!"

"But Tooth! Can't you make an exception for Baby Tooth?" wailed Jack desperately. His confidence level dropped to almost nothing in a blink of an eye. "I mean, she's so tiny and can't even lift stuff less than 50 grams! She can help me bring little, unimportant stuff like paintbrushes, and, uh, scrap paper, and, well, um…" Baby Tooth chirped indignantly, looking slightly hurt. "Shush Baby Tooth, I'm trying to convince Tooth to let you help me in the competition! I don't mean any of that, okay?" whispered Jack.

"Rules are rules, Jack," said Tooth firmly.

"Then extend time to seven hours!" bargained North.

"I say eight!" added Jack.

"Rule number 18: Negotiating with the judge prior, during, and after the competition is prohibited," recited Tooth matter-of-factly.

"Not feeling so confident now, huh, Frostbite?"

"Shut up, cottontail."

Forget helpers, Jack thought. He could manage all on his own couldn't he? He made snow, ice, frost, and snowflakes for over 3 centuries, without help of any sort.

Although having help would be much more desirable.

Jack shook his head to clear out the unnecessary thoughts. He had a competition to win.

"Alright guys! This competition is going to start! Please proceed to your separate stations," said Tooth in her perky voice.

The four Guardians went to their "stations", which consisted of a large wooden table with tools on top and a larger empty square space. "May the best Guardian win," said Bunnymund. "Please Kangaroo. You know you can't beat me," said Jack with his usual cocky smirk and eyeroll.

"We'll see about that, mate."

The four Guardians faced Tooth, who began the countdown. "Good luck guys. This competition starts in five!"

North crossed his arms, shifting into his "bring-it-on" stance.

"Four!"

Bunny lifted his head and stood with his feet further apart.

"Three!" This time grunts in yetish and squeaks joined in.

Sandy raised his hands, preparing dreamsand while Jack tightened his grip on his staff.

"Two!"

"Jingle-jingle ding-ding-ding!"

"Huh?" Tooth glanced down, surprised. Elves were bouncing about below her, waving their arms frantically with mallets in their hands.

"Oh. You guys… want to join?" They nodded their heads, causing a jingling racket.

"Look little guys, I'm sorry, but this competition is for Guardians only." said Tooth. The elves hung their heads and stomped away. One elf hit another with his mallet, causing the poor guy to fall unconscious on the ground. As a result, unsuspecting elves tripped over the victim, and soon a heap of elves were rolling on the floor jingling. Jack watched the scene with an amused look on his face.

"Don't you ever train your elves to be more disciplined, North?" asked Tooth exasperatedly. "No time, yetis more important," shrugged North.

"Never mind," muttered Tooth. "And your time starts… NOW!"

**A/N:**

**Hi guys! This is the first fanfic story I have ever written. Ever.**

**An unfinished story involving turtles and swimming lollipops does not count.**

**So, I'll probably update around Saturday. Gotta finish what you start!**

**Please leave reviews cause I really want to improve my writing. Criticism is appreciated :) Thanks for reading!**


	2. Strategies and Cheats

The sculpting competition had just begun.

A huge blueprint was spread out on North's table. Always the detail-orientated one, every margin on the paper was crammed with measurements and notes. On the top of the blueprint, the word 'Wonder' was written out in capital letters and underlined twice. Surprisingly, he wasn't sculpting from ice (which was his forte), but wood. Here's the list of reasons for his making this decision:

_1) Jack will definitely make an ice sculpture. _

_2) Jack is much better when it comes to making ice sculptures._

_3) Supply of wood is unlimited. _(As Tooth had stated before the competition: "Rule number four: Sculpting supplies are based on the competitor's own choice," along with: "Rule number five: Sculpting supplies of the competitor's choice should be taken from the inventory of Santoff Clausen one hour before the competition. Competitors are not allowed to leave their stations to get supplies from the inventory once the competition begins.")

_4) Wood lasts longer._

_5) Wood is not as fragile as ice._

_6) Chances of accident happening between yetis and wood sculpture is reduced to 60 percent. _(When writing this down, North had shot a look at Phil.)

Across from North's station, Bunny was chipping away at a seven-foot tall slab of stone. Being a rabbit (Heck, he wasn't just any rabbit, he was a Pooka), he pounded away at the block with the speed of a woodpecker. After every few hammers, he would pause to pick up a carrot lying on the table near him and munch on it.

"Eating during the competition?" Tooth had said a few minutes ago, before the competition began. She had flipped through the papers on her clipboard — apparently that wasn't mentioned in the rules— "I guess it's okay, considering that you won't have any break for refreshments for the next five…"

Tooth heard two thumps before she could finish her sentence, and when she looked up from her clipboard, she found herself talking to a yellow pansy instead of Bunny. Seven seconds later, the rabbit in question reappeared with a bundle of carrots.

Jack had frowned with confusion. "Did you resort to stealing carrots from a vegetable store just to satisfy your rabbit appetite?"

"Pays to have a vegetable garden in the Warren, mate."

Currently, Bunny was chomping on his fifth carrot. The sounds of the hammer striking the chisel along with the crunches formed a rhythm that echoed throughout the room.

Thump-thump. Crunch.

Thump-thump-thump. Crunch.

In the other corner of the room, Sandy's expression was focused as he produced streams of brilliant dreamsand with flourishes of his hands. The golden grains piled up higher and higher, until they almost touched the sky-high ceiling.

In less than a minute, Sandy had created a colossal, sparkling castle right in the center of the room. The other Guardians turned when they sensed a shadow creeping through the space, and gawked at the sight of the ginormous sandcastle blocking out the rays shining through the domed skylight.

"Not fair!" North whined, like a child who just dropped his ice-cream cone on the pavement. Jack and Bunny just turned to glare at the smirking Sandman.

Sandy had his hands on his hips and was grinning to himself when someone tapped his shoulder. Warily, he turned around to see Tooth squinting intensely at him. Sandy winced as he realized what was coming.

"Just what do you think you are doing, Sanderson? Rule number seventeen is painfully obvious: Sculpting must be done _manually_, which means _no magic!_ If I had not made up that rule, you would be done in less than five minutes. Five minutes, Sandy! Just think of North and Bunny, who don't have this advantage! It is absolutely unfair and unsportsmanlike! Honestly! For goodness's sake Sandy, use some real sand, please!" Tooth paused to take a deep breath before continuing. "Now, go—"

She was cut off by Sandy, who conjured a stop sign above his head, with an "I'm-done-listening-to-you-ranting" expression on his face. Rolling his eyes, he stomped off to get buckets and a spray bottle, which the yetis brought into the room beforehand. ("Psychic yetis," Jack murmured to himself).

"Well." Tooth turned around and caught the rest of the Guardians staring. "Show's over, people! Time waits for no one!" She clapped sharply. They quickly lowered their heads.

"Nice try, Sandy, but you're doing it all wrong." A big, evil grin made its way to Jack's face as he face the wall, making sure to hide what he was about to do next.

The second Tooth left the room ("Just to see if my mini fairies remembered to cover sector 27 in Malaysia,"), he tapped the tall but melting block of ice in front of him with his staff. It refroze immediately and grew twice its original size, as his evil-looking grin did the same.

He was never one for rules.

Bunny heard a crackle behind him, and glanced over his shoulder just when the curve of Jack's staff made contact with the now solid ice. His eyes narrowed into slits.

"Playing dirty, eh, mate?" He thumped the floor with his hind paw.

A nanosecond later, a gaping hole appeared underneath the ice-cube and swallowed it up.

Jack gasped, then shot an icy glare at Bunny. The Pooka cackled.

"Hey! What was that for?" exclaimed Jack. The sight of Bunny snickering maddened him.

Suddenly, the perfect idea for payback struck him. He looked from Bunny's sculpture-in-progress to Bunny himself, then back again. He half-smiled at Bunny and shrugged one shoulder casually, then aimed for the massive block with his staff and fired. A thick layer of frost shot out from the staff, snaking around the block and almost completely concealing the stone within.

Bunny sputtered: "Why you bloody little—"

"Good luck chipping that off, Kangaroo." Jack did a funny little victory dance, which looked like a cross between the can-can and the macarena.

While Bunny was shooting verbal arrows at Jack, North threw up his hands in frustration. He was just too used to making small, detailed ice prototypes, not ginormous wood sculptures. "I'm no good at this! I need help!" He scanned the space rapidly, and locked his fierce stare on Paul, a tawny yeti too short for his kind. "You!" North pointed at him. "Sculpt. This."

Paul did a "What?" gesture with his hands and managed a garbled "But, but…"

"Sculpt this or you will be assigned with elf-sitting duty for fifty years!"

Paul wrung his enormous hands and snuck a nervous look at the elves running rabidly around Santoff Clausen, covering each other in plaster. Paul didn't want to break the rules set by Tooth, but he liked the idea of chasing after insane, drunk-like elves around the building even less. He picked up multiple tools from North's tabletop at once and started working on North's sculpture like a madman.

"Ah, this is more like it." North sat heavily on a flimsy wooden chair, nearly crushing it with his weight. He closed his eyes and laid his head on the top of the tall chair, sighing in content as he did so.

He could hear the jingle-jangling of an elf coming closer to his left, so he stuck out his left foot. Instead of tripping the elf, the teeny creature bumped violently into North's large boot and fell backward. North peeled open one huge eye to look at the elf.

"Ah, Dingle. One tray of frosted cookies straight from the kitchen, please."

Dingle nodded in delight. Of course, being around elves for over 7 centuries, North knew exactly what he was thinking.

"Don't you even think of having the slightest nibble at a single cookie, Dingle, or there will be…" North opened the other eye and said in an ominous tone, "…consequences."

Dingle's expression did a complete one-eighty as he flashed back to the day of his last "consequence", when he got sat on by one of the yetis. He gulped and made a beeline towards the exit without another jingle.

North shut his eyes again. "Ah, elves," he chuckled.

Meanwhile, Dingle was zooming off in the direction of the kitchen. One second, he was a blur of red and green, running like an elf star on the track; the next, he slammed into the heel of yet another Guardian. This time, he didn't topple over immediately, but teetered on one leg, windmilling his arms frantically before managing to land with both feet firmly on the ground. Dingle puffed out a breath in relief, then glanced up to see who he hit.

This time it was Sandy, who was watching the elf's antics with mild amusement. When he regained his balance, Sandy made a 'get along' gesture with his hands, and he sped off.

Barely visible frown lines appeared on Sandy's forehead as he turned to face his disaster of a sculpture. He was far from happy. The normal sand he used as his only medium was dull and grayish, and even more frustratingly, the particles just won't stick together properly. Every time he removed the bucket carefully from the sand, the latter just collapses immediately. He tried spraying the sand in its mold with water before turning it over, but it just crumbles into a wet, slushy heap. He hadn't even finished a simple base for his sculpture yet.

He tried one more time. Scoop up sand, dump it into a bucket, spray, turn it over, reveal.

To his great surprise and joy, the little sand tower stayed intact.

For a few seconds, anyway.

As the tower crumbled away, so did Sandy's short-lived grin. Dreamsand steam burst out of his flaring nostrils, like a kettle on the boil. He turned the bucket right side up again and sat on it, deflated.

"No, _no!_ Look at this corner, it is rounded! Corners are _sharp, _my boy, they are sharp, at ninety-degree angles! Fix it!"

Sandy whipped around to see North pinching the skin between his eyebrows while pointing at a part of his wooden sculpture. The yeti standing next to him groaned and picked up a mallet. North, however, dropped onto a chair and picked up a cookie on a tray.

Sandy's bright amber eyes glanced from North to the frustrated yeti, then flitted over to the judge's table, where a certain iridescent feathered fairy was nowhere to be seen.

A golden light bulb lit up above his head.

The Guardian of Dreams floated up from his chair, and started building his sculpture. With dreamsand.

After all, he didn't want North to be the only one who had it easy, did he?

-X-

Jack, on the other hand, couldn't do much for the time being, considering that he needed to freeze lots of water to make his ice sculpture. He lost his only block of ice, thanks to Bunny. At least he got even with him. And as the grunts and curses under Bunny's breath suggested, he had him good, too.

Jack snuck a glance at Sandy, who was doing pretty well without the spray bottle and buckets of water right at his feet. Still, it was a no-brainer that the water he had was far less than enough to freeze into an ice block of considerable size.

"The only way to get more water," Jack concluded softly, "is to get out."

He headed for the exit, trying hard not to crush any elves under his feet. When he reached the mahogany doors, two yetis came out of nowhere and blocked his path. They both folded their bulky arms, and one raised an eyebrow at Jack.

"Seriously?" groaned Jack. "Come on guys. I just need some water."

The gray yeti to Jack's left snapped his fingers, and an elf came running with a glass of water on a tray. The yeti picked it up and thrust it at Jack, splashing his hoodie in the process.

"Thanks, but no thanks. What I meant was, lots of water. In buckets. That sort of thing."

This time, the yetis didn't budge.

"Well, could you at least help me get some?"

The only response he got was, "Mphragh."

"Please?"

The sandy colored yeti on the right raised his other eyebrow.

Jack held up his hands. "Guys, I really don't want to do this, but... you're kind of forcing me. No hard feelings, okay?" The yetis glanced at each other briefly in confusion.

From outside the double doors of the room, a few zaps were heard along with some incomprehensible yetish swears. A couple of seconds later, Jack burst out of the doors, yelling: "The ice melts in less than an hour! Try to keep your feet warm after that!"

And with that, he zoomed away, laughing his head off.

******A/N:**

**"So, I'll probably update around Saturday," I said a month ago. God, I am so good at lying that I fool even myself. I just wasn't getting much inspiration for this story at first, but I got enough just in time. Whew.  
**

**I originally wanted this to be a bunch of drabbles, but something told me that wasn't going to work out. So I changed everything- the title, the summary, all that. The drabbles will be dealt with some other time.**

**Special thanks to TheJoyousCrosser, who was my first reviewer. Just when I thought that writing wasn't exactly my thing, your review came along and cheered me up. I'll keep writing just for the love of it, and hopefully I can also spread that joy to all readers. Thank you!**


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